


Eragon: The Redux

by Archbass



Category: The Inheritance Cycle - Christopher Paolini
Genre: Alternate Universe -- Reinterpretation of Canon, Discussions of the Writing Process, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Multi, Reinterpretation of Canon Characterization, Reinterpretation of Canon Relationships, Rewrite, constructive criticism, divergence from canon, thought experiment
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-09
Updated: 2017-10-20
Packaged: 2018-07-13 23:02:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7141685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Archbass/pseuds/Archbass
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What would happen if Eragon were a good story? Not that it isn't entertaining already (for some reasons being more intentional than others), but it has quite a few structural problems to it. So, what if it were a really good story? Like, really, really good? What would happen if the story were revised by some random person on the internet in an attempt to give it the lifeblood of a reworked plot, a more consistent tone, more in-depth characterization, a less-Monomyth-reliant story structure, and a more smooth integration of the lore into the story?</p><p>Let us take a journey into a revised Alagaesia. Let us follow the steps of Eragon the Shadeslayer with a renewed moral compass and reconstructed character arc. Let us see villains now as compelling as the heroes who are fighting them. Let us fix Alagaesia together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

They hadn’t made it further than the edge of the Spine before the silence of the birds wrote their doom on every tree branch, on every stray cloud. What had begun as a favor between friends began to weigh down on Faolin’s shoulders. His mail suddenly constricted around his breath, and his ears stung to their tips. That was the sort of noise that Urgals made -- a low grumbling like wild animals packed too tightly in a cage. He could see their shadows in the distance.

The three of them -- himself, Arya, and Glenwing -- had carefully chosen this path knowing that Galbatorix’s own soldiers, at least the humans, wouldn’t pursue them into territory that even the craziest of cartographers refused to coherently map. The Spine was supposed to be the one range of mountains filled with every set of backwoods hamlet, every sort of human scum of the earth that Emperor Galbatorix had ever promised to fight for in ages past. This was their roundabout path to shake pursuit; their plan was perfected, charted, and re-charted to write in new contingencies. Faolin was one of the few elves who cared about such words. Immortality made it hard to consider one point in time as immediate, and certainly not immediate moments introspectively.

Not when the shuffling of branches and cracking of leaves beneath the feet of tens, maybe more, rustled from every direction. The birds were silent. Arya motioned for them to stop. Her helmet hid her eyes under its sleek, ebon surface, but Faolin knew where she was searching: down the path, where their route took a sharp incline down into a dusty gulley. A silhouette pierced the night’s darkness several shades beneath the greys and greens of the wilderness. It was the first urgal, soon joined by a couple others, emerging with their weapons drawn. Glenwing drew his curved, shining spear, and glanced towards Arya. Arya nodded forward.

“We should keep moving,” he said. “We can’t let them stop us, not now.” He clutched in his other, gauntleted hand the satchel they had snatched out of the Empire’s clutches. This was worth more than their lives, for sure, but it couldn’t go anywhere without their lives. Faolin kept his eye on his surroundings. The bushes around them began rustling again. That didn’t stop Glenwing. He snapped his reins and his courser charged. He lowered his spear.

Another ambusher sprung from the side of the incline, and knocked Glenwing off his horse. The horse plowed into the urgals at the end of the path, but his cries were silenced seconds later, following the sound of steel sliding between flesh and bone. Faolin drew his bow, and shot the ambusher beating against Glenwing.

The urgal dropped off of Glenwing, allowing him to get up, but the ambushers at the end of the hill came charging up. Faolin filled them with arrows as well.

“Go! Go!” Arya commanded.

“Not without you, princess,” Faolin said. There were more than three bodies on the road by now, two rolling back down and into the gully. There were heavier footsteps up ahead.

A horse head sailed through the air, landing at the hooves of Arya’s horse. Her’s reared back, and panicked. She held on, but not before another pair of ambushers leapt from the bushes. The first, Faolin bashed aside with his bow. The second reached his horse, and threw him from his reins. Glenwing’s spear, thrown from a short distance away, skewered that ambusher. He tossed the satchel to Arya. She caught it and tried charging down the gully.

She skidded to a stop, staring into the darkness, at the last ambusher. Faolin chased her down into the gully.

A single land-bridge separated the two halves of the gully here. At one side, Faolin and Arya squared off. Glenwing started after him, but a pair of crossbow bolts hamstrung him. By the time he made it to the bottom, he lost balance and fell. His scream echoed from below, but Faolin couldn’t hear a thud or a crack. The ambushers at the top of the hill lowered their crossbows. When Faolin followed Arya’s gaze, he could see why.

A massive figure clad from head to toe in furs, and interlocking plates of armor stood in the way. In his hands he held a blood-stained claymore, hilted with a sculpture of a ghostly face, whose crossguard bore the shape of outstretched bony fingers. The amethyst on his pommel glinted brighter than the blood stained steel. The figure himself wore a beaked helmet intricately sculpted with a skull-shaped visor, while his pauldrons were sculpted with the cross-sworded, shield-bearing signage of Galbatorix’s empire.

He raised his sword, pointing its serrated edge in Arya’s and Faolin’s direction.

“How audacious,” he said. His voice sounded hollow, like the warmth and depth of a mortal voice had just been pulled from his throat, and replaced with a pool of freezing water. “How brazen of you to take the only ways that His Excellency’s men won’t reach.” He flourished his sword, easily big enough for two hands or even two men, but wielded with swift ease here, and drove it point-first into the dirt in front of him. “It’s a shame we can’t allow you to leave. A war with the elves is the _last_ thing anyone wants, no?”

Faolin couldn’t trust the sarcasm dripping from the armored figure’s voice. He couldn’t trust the red, beady eyes glimmering behind the visor of his helmet. Of course, anyone dressed in the tresses of death only dealt in it. The figure’s cloak billowed, tattered in places, trimmed with the burn marks of fires. The gust of wind brought a chill to Faolin’s rapidly-beating heart. He reached to his hip, towards his scabbarded blade. He glanced to Arya, for orders.

Arya didn’t answer him. She clutched the satchel tighter. She was shaking, constantly glancing to the gorge, where Glenwing had fallen. She choked the moment the _thud_ finally rang through it.

“Not much for conversation, are we?” the shade of a man said. “I’m afraid you’ll need to speak up if you want to pass. I won’t yield until you return _them_ to His Excellency.” He outstretched a gauntleted hand, fingers twitching in beckoning.

Arya handed Faolin the satchel. The weight of it he had felt leagues behind them as they gathered their prize together felt only a third as heavy.

“I’ve got the others,” Arya whispered. “Take the third to him, meet him halfway, but slip away any way you can.” She intoned, hand reaching down to grasp his shoulder tightly: “Don’t waste your life, Faolin.” He looked into the satchel. It was only one piece of the prize: a blue egg, glowing with a lapis surface in the moonlight. He quickly closed it, and turned to the armored figure at the other end of the bridge. The urgals behind them began to chant, in their sloppy way:

“Fight ‘em, Durza! Fight! Fight! Fight!”

“Durza’s got ‘em cornered! The boss is the strongest!”

Faolin took his first step onto the bridge. The man at the other end, Durza, it seemed, laughed through his helmet.

“Why fight when we can extract _each and every thing we want piece by piece,_ my friends?” he said. His voice boomed just loud enough for the urgals to hear it. They fell silent for a moment, before they started hooting again. Faolin eased his hand off his sword, and glanced to his sides. There was barely two yards of space to work with between him and the chasm that claimed Glenwing. “Hand it over!” Durza said again. He took his first steps onto the bridge, blade in hand.

Arya looked ready to send her horse in a gallop alongside the edge of the gully, to head north. The urgals still chanted and hooted. If they were paying attention, they still had their weapons lowered.

Faolin took this as his opportunity. He charged forward. He lowered his shoulders, and kept his head down, arms clutching the egg in its mostly-empty satchel. He plowed into Durza. He felt him budge, and turn, sending him sailing into the grasses behind Durza. He tumbled forward, and caught himself in a forward roll. Once on his feet again, he caught a glance behind him: Durza was striding to him like a man who couldn’t quite run. His shadow loomed over Faolin. There was something about his walk that seemed more confident than slowed.

When Faolin took off again, he stumbled again, this time against something fleshy. His glance back caught the side of Glenwing’s horse, wounded with a gaping open wound in the chest, and nothing but a neck stump where his head should have been. It gave him pause, enough for him to hear Durza:

_"Eitha medh vindr"_

The wind picked up again. Durza outstretched his hand, and thrust an open palm to Faolin. A concentrated gust knocked the wind out of him, and sent him flying further. He felt something hit him, then he felt himself crash to the ground. The egg barely stayed in his arms, but when he managed to get a look up, he couldn’t feel his legs. He tried to catch his breath, but Durza caught up to him. He could see the spurs on his greaves, and those beady eyes staring down at him.

“Pathetic,” he said. He wiped the blood off his sword onto his cloak. The sword bore runes in the ancient language: _Eld Deyja Varas_ . The Slayer of Spring. _Pathetic, indeed_ , Faolin thought as he found himself admiring the cruel briars sculpted on the blade. Durza sheathed it, and knelt down before his crumpled body. “What do you think you’ve done by coming out here, just to take one egg, hm? His Excellency has others, many to replace this little batch.”

Faolin held the egg tighter against his chest. He couldn’t answer, not with his breath still catching up to him. Durza shrugged, pacing about as he spoke. With his back facing Faolin, he saw the coat of arms painted in a wine-colored shade: an asp wrapped over a woodsman’s axe. It was new, for sure. No other elf, Dragon Rider or otherwise, had seen the new human noble houses of Alagaesia. Faolin hadn’t paid much attention to politics before Arya’s mission, but he already thought them all to be plunderers and tyrants, like their master.

“It would be much easier for you to hand over that egg right now, wouldn’t it? You’re not going to get very far with … hm, let me see…” Durza raised his hand to his face thoughtfully. His eyes glinted brighter as he spoke: “ _Stund lifs._ ” He paused, then chuckled. “It looks like you won’t be able to walk for the rest of your life… Were I a healer and not the end of your mercy, I’d advise you to find a horse and stay on it, but…” He glanced back at the headless carcass behind him, and chuckled. “...I’m afraid instead I will have to visit a number of horrors upon you personally.”

Faolin glanced towards the gorge. Arya and the urgals were nowhere to be seen. So why was Durza so invested here? He pulled the egg from its satchel, and kept his eye on the gorge. It must have been about twelve yards by now. He shifted, now that his breath was back. He couldn’t move his legs, but he managed to push himself to sit. Durza watched him.

“My spell only tracks your life without … outside influence. I can see you have quite some time to live. Elves. How their immortality infuriates all sense of purpose, no?” He stepped closer again. Faolin felt Durza’s cold, gauntleted hand grasp his scalp, pulling at his hair, and lift him off the ground singlehandedly. _Eld Deyja Varas_ was in his other hand.

Faolin let his arms fall slack. The egg was in his right. This was going to be it. _I’m sorry, Arya_ , he thought. He looked into those glowing eyes while Durza reared his blade back, ready to thrust through him.

“It seems you elves aren’t much for last words either. Such a shame. In another life, I would have loved to dine.”

“But you’re already dead, aren’t you?” Faolin rasped. “You might as well be, serving Emperor Galbatorix.”

“Did I mention another of _my_ lives? No. I meant one of _yours_.”

Just before Durza thrust _Eld Deyja Varas_ through Faolin’s ribs and straight through his heart, Faolin threw the egg. It sailed over Durza’s helmet, and landed just at the edge of the gorge. It distracted Durza just enough for him to miss his mark. The wicked blade sank hilt-deep, but missed Faolin’s heart by nearly an inch. Durza dropped him again, and sprinted towards the gorge. The egg rolled off the edge.

Everything felt cold and heavy now. But Faolin thought of Arya and Glenwing -- he thought of the three of them, heading into this little task of theirs with bluster. He thought of the quiet trip into Uru’baen, blending in as performers. He thought of the humans they did meet on the road who didn’t mind them. He thought of the hope they had built just by the thoroughness of their plan. The elves as a whole weren’t going to stand up to Galbatorix, and hadn’t ever since the fall of the Dragon Riders, but that wasn’t going to stop Arya. She would get the others back home, he always figured.

Humans always said that death caused their lives to flash before their eyes, but he didn’t know that would apply to elves, ever. Youth and immortality never mixed; that regret infected Faolin even in his temporary victory.

Watching Durza lean over the gorge, screaming and shrieking brought a grin to his face. _That was for Glenwing,_ he wanted to manage, but all that came out was a gob of blood.

Durza returned to him, his armor rising and falling, hyperventilating. He yanked the sword from Faolin again, and reared it back in both hands, as if it had grown heavier. It came down, and ended Faolin’s life.


	2. The Prey and the Treasure

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eragon finds an egg-like object that he does not mistake for a stone over the course of three chapters. He only aspires to help his family, but what will finding this strange object mean for them?
> 
> I mean, it's a Call to Adventure, but we as an audience are the only ones who'd know that.

Eragon held his breath, the arrow knocked just beneath his eye. The fletching used to itch his face, but years of hunting had gotten him used to the feeling of feathers inches from his eyelid. In his sights was a doe -- the largest he had seen in years. If he threw away this shot, that would be that, and his triumphant return to Palancar Valley would be marked with laughter and disappointment, mostly his own. Even now, the lack of success from his last hunt haunted him, and the one before that where the buck he had shot had fallen into one of The Spine’s many grey gorges.

The doe sipped at the creek in front of him. It flowed southward, surrounded on two sides by sheer, craggy rock faces. The moonlight gave the shallow waters a shimmer that Eragon hoped didn’t also reflect off of his arrowhead. That had been his bane, usually, being unable to stop the unfortunate problem of light reflecting from metal. He had tried to stop it multiple ways—sticking the arrow in mud before firing it ruined it's trajectory. Burying it in dirt made it shine even worse when light reflected off the bits of mineral hiding within The Spine’s earth.

So far so good— the doe didn't move, not enough to ruin his shot. Now, he had to combat his shaking hands, and everything else in nature. One wrong move from himself or anything else cracking a twig too distinctly and it would bound off. Mice were easier to hunt, he thought every now and then.

He let the arrow loose.

Something cracked in a thicket across the creek but further off. No: something thudded with enough force not for the deer to just look up and twitch its ears, but to bound and bungle a slipping escape. Eragon scrambled for another arrow. His last arrow didn't hit the neck like he had hoped, instead burying itself just through the front leg. He hoped it was enough to maybe get a second shot in.

He knocked it, and tried to trace the doe’s erratic flight. His ears were ringing from whatever that booming impact was, but his vision was sharper now, his blood pumping. A part of him wanted more hunts to be like this, and in the moment the rush just electrified him from head to toe. He fired.

And he missed. The arrow impaled a thin sapling, and the deer limped away.

He sighed. That rush went away as quickly as it had come, leaving a new rough tingling on his fingers and shaky legs. He followed that deer; it didn't take long for his disappointment to clip into a second wind the moment he remembered deer tended to take the pain of an arrow more harshly than a person.

He had to find that out the hard way the first time he accidentally shot himself in the foot—literally. His boots covered the scar, and his feet were still able to carry him after the deer. The last deer he had even grazed sprinted for a couple seconds before it started limping — if only he hadn't run out of arrows getting that far. That gave him the hope to give chase this time.

The creek bent under a crossing of the gorge above—one of the few actual roads in The Spine. The rickety bridge that loomed overhead on most nights hung precariously off one ledge, it's ropes frayed cleanly at the ends. The hoofsteps from the deer splashed along the creek at slower and slower beats. Yet, the broken crossing stopped him in his tracks. He retraced his steps.

His route from Palancar Valley took him well beyond that crossing, but still crossing the road that lead to it. It was one of a couple roads into and out of the valley, but whoever cut the bridge just sent travelers going into the valley along the longer way.

The deer stopped. A bigger splash rang from the end of the creek. He ran after that splash.

At the end of the creek he felt he got turned around at first. The cliffaces closed in together a bit more after the crossing, and the creek forked a few yards after that. The deer wasn't at the form. There was a small trail of blood along the bank, dotting along the left fork. The creek fed into a gully where it widened a bit, the blood trail and hoofprints following along the precarious edge where tiny strips of mud ran up against the cliff face. The crag widened a little bit, the creek finally ending at a pond.

Unless it rained recently, which it didn't, the pond wouldn't be more than ankle-deep. Instead, it was a calm bed for a ring of grasses and shrubs. A few near-dead trees loomed at the edge like the lone petals on a plucked flower.

The deer was there, on its side, arrow sticking out where he had hit it. Its breathing slowed, and strained. He approached. His stomach growled. He wondered for a moment how he was going to get it all back to the farm. He had seen his older brother Rowan lift sacks of grain over his shoulders, but then his brother was a giant by most people’s standards. Being the younger of them, Eragon stood a foot beneath his brother and had less muscle on him to boot.

That wasn’t where the differences between him and the rest of his family ended. He was the only blonde one among them, though the amount of dirt in his hair from these little hunts made it just as scraggly both in luster and callousness as any typical peasant. He was also the runt of them. He should have grown to the same giant size as Rowan this year -- for fifteen he was more cat than ox, and in want of a couple extra inches.

He started to think. Maybe, just maybe, he thought, he could spend maybe a couple hours more than he had originally planned, and fashion some kind of makeshift dragnet out of tree branches and…

He checked his bags. He did not have rope. He turned to the lake and kicked a rock into it in frustration. The splashed water shimmered strangely. It stopped him from yelling his curses at himself for not bringing a net. Instead, he leaned over the water. He splashed at it with his hand a little more.

There was that strange glimmer again. He knelt down and started digging through the sediment, until he felt something smooth and dense. He pulled it from the lakebed.

It was roughly the breadth of a shovel spade and as long as two of his hands, but under the moonlight it shined like the surface of a dulled sapphire. It made him at first think of giant precious stones—ones he could pawn in town and maybe afford a few extra seasons of meat for the family, or maybe more than that. The thought of coin alone made him grin—but he half-wondered if it was supposed to be a fever dream compared to the dying deer carcass next to him.

Then, he noticed its exact shape when he inspected it again. Down to the slight curve at its tip and it's broad bottom it looked more like an egg than anything. When he felt the outside of it again, he drew that conclusion. If it were some kind of precious stone, it would be more caked in dirt, enough to cut his fingers, he figured.

After turning it over in his hands a couple more times, he wondered what it could be growing in there. He then wondered if much like a chicken egg it could be eaten.

That wonder lasted all of a minute. He spent that minute testing its hardness against another rock. It didn't even scratch the egg’s surface. That also ruled out boiling it to him. His growling stomach subsided. He packed the egg away. Maybe it would be worth something to someone in town, edible or otherwise.

He returned to the deer. A second glance at it, and another second glance at his pack, and yet another second glance towards the night sky drew his conclusion for him. He couldn't carry it over his shoulders—he couldn't even lift it. He began dragging the deer by the legs back home, up the creek, and all the way back to the farm. The strain against his shoulders haunted him, but the egg bobbing along in his pack excited him more than the strain could stop him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Paolini’s Chapter 2 (titled "Discovery") is painfully short. Now, when I first read Eragon when it first hit the presses, this was a blessing. Middle School book report deadlines are no joke, after all, and the faster you can turn a page to get the next one the faster you can complete that book report. For what it set out to do, it did get most of what it needed across as far as narrative is concerned -- and that’s kind of a common thing I’ll say, I’ll admit, that for all its flaws Eragon’s pacing isn’t a consistent one. Yet, under a critical lens the shortness of this chapter brings us some problems.
> 
> This is our first introduction to Eragon as a person, and it is hurt by the breakneck pacing of the chapter. He is a teenager, outdoorsy, curious, a little naive, impulsive, and, as we find out later in the book, illiterate when we first meet him. Only a couple of these things is apparent in the first chapter we meet him, and a couple other things are read into him over the course of further chapters. I believe I knew what was intended: that Paolini wanted to make an identifiable, sympathetic protagonist in Eragon. With this pacing, though, we don't really see enough of his strain on the hunt. I hope I addressed some of that in this version. Unlike a lot of later chapters, there isn't a lot spelled out to the reader in exposition on the front end except maybe Eragon's physical description, so for all its pacing problems all it needed was more focus on the physical space and action of the scene.
> 
> There's a big problem, though, lying within one little plot thread that Paolini kept for reasons I cannot begin to fathom: Eragon doesn't know what an egg is, apparently, and there's this false mystery that rings hollow until it hatches. This turns naivete into stupidity -- after all, illiteracy and stupidity aren't exactly the same thing (correlation =/= causation, and all that jazz). Eragon was adopted by peasants. They should know what a chicken is, and what chickens make to produce chicks. Point is, if there's any blatant diversion from canon in this chapter as compared to the first, it's that Eragon can identify an egg.
> 
> Edit: There's the matter of family relationships that I want to talk about in the next two chapters, but if anyone is confused as to why Eragon would think of Garrow and Roran as his father and brother respectively, the short of it is to help maintain another bit of internal logic specific to how Garrow acts around all the weird stuff that happens in Alagaesia. If only to give a taste about what's coming up for discussion soon.
> 
> EDIT [5/9/2017]: changed where the arrow struck the deer.


	3. Palencar Valley

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After a fairly long hiatus, I finally publish the chapter giving a fresh coat of paint to Palencar Valley.

**Palancar Valley**

It was a sight for sore shoulders, and sore everything. When Eragon crested the last rocky hill, dragging the very scuffed up deer behind him, he sat down to catch his breath, and catch a view he never got tired of.

He was on one of a couple hills overlooking Palancar Valley. The moist, patchy grass eventually washed into a broad, green expanse that stretched on for miles. The river stretched and bowed its snakelike path straight through a patchwork of farms that curved around it. In the distance, the farms gave way to a village, Carvahall, itself built along the river. A castle, flying the Empire’s banners, more a monument than anything the village knew it for anymore, stood on its lonesome behind a token, crumbling wall. The river snaked around it, giving the castle around it a sunken tilt eastward—a point of endless ridicule for whoever could be dared to stay in it for more than a night.

Eragon remembered what his father would tell him about the Empire attempting to use that castle as a mayoral mansion: the fact that it kept sinking inch by inch every couple years induced nightmares in the first four or five mayors so long that they eventually just called it the Sinking Castle and left it to rot. The only thing the Empire ever cleaned was its banners: a field of scarlet, stamped with the blackened shape of a snaking dragon and an equally blackened wreath of garlands sweeping beneath it.

He started down the hill. Dragging the deer down was far easier than hauling it up at first. The hill did half the work for him...then his hands slipped and it finished the job. He stopped his clumsy descent, watching as the stiff deer started to tumble without him. He bolted after it.

It drew closer with his sprint. His foot caught on something and he stumbled forward. He caught himself for another sprint. He still drew closer. Then his toes struck a more solid stone. He sailed over it, and the deer. He tumbled right, but couldn't stop himself.

Moments later, and many bruises with his fall, he stared into the clear sky, his back resting on a bed of junipers. His arrows had spilled from his quiver and rolled down to rest just before the base of the bush, and the deer had stopped well behind him.

The road was to his left. It too followed alongside the river, eventually turning from wet dirt to uneven warped cobblestone the closer to the farms it got. He pushed himself to his feet, brushing bits and pieces of dirt and juniper sprigs to the sound of a pair of footsteps.

They were imperial soldiers. They weren't an uncommon sight here, but they never traveled in any more than groups of four around here. These two were regulars, recruited directly from Carvahall: a short, portly man, the son of the weaver named Edger Weaver, and a man who was all legs, the son of butcher, named Orsin Carver. They both were older than Eragon, though closer to his height than that of every other villager older than he. It was as if Edger never had his growth spurt, and as if Orsin’s ended at his hips and spared his torso. They stared at him dumbfounded at first.

“Another trip to the Spine?” Orsin said. “You know it’s gonna kill you one day.” He yawned into his hand, wiped his nose with the edge of his scarlet tabard, and snorted up an obviously stuffy nose.

“Give ‘im a break,” Edger said. “Look, he even bagged something.”

“The doe up there? That could’ve died falling down the hill.”

“You think so? Hey, Eragon, did it die falling down the hill?”

“No, sir.” He hated that he had to call these two ‘sir’. He almost wanted to spit every time he said ‘sir,’ because they would not have had that little honorific if the Empire didn’t look at them and decide that they were worthy to walk back and forth up the road every morning. He slowly made his way back to the deer while they continued discussing. He was pretty sure it was discussing. It wasn’t the first time they got tied up on tiny details together.

“Then what killed it?”

“Idunno. You see that mark near the neck?” Of the two of them, Orsin sounded far more tired. If Eragon knew anything of his fellow villagers, even those the Empire recruited still helped around their homes and shops. If Orsin’s father was still the same kind of hard-nosed taskmaster that he always was, then he must have been up quite late carving up cows and pigs again. The bags under his eyes said that much, as did his yawning every other word.

“You mean the front leg?”

“Either way, that looks like an…” another yawn, “...arrow wound.” He was definitely sharper than his father. Eragon never knew whether that was a good or bad thing.

“Oh! I see what you’re doing. You’re doing what the section captain told us about: investigating with evidence!” Eragon stopped in his tracks. Investigating? He didn’t think he was committing a crime. There hadn’t been a ‘Lord’ in Carahavall in decades, let alone anyone who could possibly take offense to poaching. If anything, the Empire was supposed to have made hunting legal, so long as it was for food and not sport.

“Yeah, yeah. And, uh, what was that law that the captain told us about as well?” Another yawn, this time Orsin swallowed it before he could drop his whiskery mouth open again. “The statute number…”

As Orsin struggled to come up with his malarky legal explanation for whatever crime Eragon had committed.

“Right. Statute Carhavall-twelve, section five: poachers, heretofore defined as those who hunt in or in territory deemed too dangerous for surveyors, shall, upon a compree-hensive investiagtion have any yield of their hunt confiscated upon first offense.” Edger seemed awfully proud to recite this, though the way he tripped over himself made Eragon smirk. He probably spent all night trying to memorize that.

“That’s right, isn’t it?” Orsin made his way to the deer. He knelt down in front of it, and licked his lips. “It’s pretty big, too. Big for you, squirt.”

“Too bad we have to take it from you,” Edger said. He started his own climb, while Orsin began to take the deer by the neck. He tried to hurry Edger up to take it by the haunches.

Eragon tried to think fast of a way to keep the deer. He at first thought of the egg -- he technically found that on his hunt too. He was just about to reach into his pack and show it to them, but then he wondered if they would mistake it for a precious stone the way he almost did. He didn’t know if it was greed, or if he was slowly turning into a mother hen. Either way, he had to think of something different. He remembered the ‘for food’ loophole, and fought himself out of his shock, and his inability to get a word in edgewise.

“How often does Sloan get deer in his butchery, Orsin?”

Orsin stopped, looking up with his tired eyes at Eragon.

“Not often, why?”

“Maybe we could uh, forget this, and share it?”

“The captain might not be happy with that,” Edger said.

“The captain also said that serving the empire is also about not making your community hate your guts, right?”

“Yeah, but--”

“So if we give the deer to my dad, it’s still a punishment, cause the squirt here doesn’t get to keep the whole thing, but at the same time, you don’t cause him to think of us -- and the whole empire -- as one giant sod in a red cape. You see how I’m thinkin’ on this?”

The gears appeared to turn for maybe half a second in Edger’s head before he shrugged and gave up. “Fine. You’re still coming with us, squirt.”

“Can I at least get my arrows?” Eragon pointed towards the juniper bush.

“If you don’t catch up to us, you’ll lose the deer.”

The two of them hoisted the deer up and started their march back onto the road.

“See? We’ll be model constables by the end of the summer if we do things this way, Edger!”

“I still don’t think the captain will be all that much happy.”

“He’d be angrier if we got in a fight with the squirt over something this simple. You see the look in his eyes?”

“Pffft, he’s half Roran’s size. What would he even do?”

Orsin glanced towards the river, then back to Edger. The river flowed calmly, but fast enough that no one could easily swim in it if they were just tossed into it without warning. They seemed to agree. Eragon scrambled to get as many arrows as he could. He managed to pick up five of them before he could chase after Edger and Orsin.

  
The village was more spread out than it appeared from the top of the hill. The cobbles of the road straightened out the closer to the center they came. The whole town sprang around a large well, built and rebuilt multiple times and with each time larger and deeper. A bowed roof hung over the well; outsiders would have quickly mistook it for a fountain, were Carhavall ever that wealthy. The three of them made a beeline through the roundabout, past the quiet passersby.

Some even waved towards them -- not towards Eragon, who had his shoulders slumped and his head held low behind Orsin and Edger. He recognized a couple -- Horst, the smith, was making his way back to his work, carrying lumber and a bucket of water in his huge, dusty hands. His smithy spouted a gout of ashen smoke nearby. Just next to the smithy, an open door wafted out the raw, fleshy stench that both made Eragon’s skin crawl and his stomach growl at the same time. That was the shop and home of the butcher, Sloan Carver, father of two and the kind of bitter person who lorded over unsalted meat like it was artistry. Edger and Orsin hauled the deer closer to that place, through the door and to the sound of Sloan’s questions.

Eragon followed sheepishly in, to Sloan’s remarks—the butcher having not waited for Edger or Orsin to answer him. The pungent smell of raw meat overwhelmed him at first; Sloan, being the only butcher in Carvahall, had meats from every farmer in the surrounding valley—even Eragons’ family—hanging behind a counter. None of this lasted so long that the flies couldn't get to it. If there was one thing Eragon had to thank the Empire for, and it really was only one thing, it was forcing inspections of the meat every now and then.

This did mean less meat, but at least none of it made any of Carhavall’s villagers sick. Or at least less of it did. Eragon imagined Sloan, were it not for his pride, would have put up a sign tracking the number of days since someone had gotten sick from his meat. He wasn't the only man in Carhavall that viewed the empire with such disdain, even at their best, but Sloan was one of the few who was vocal about it.

“That's sure some sloppy shooting, I’ll say. They don't train you boys very good at that, do they?”

The boys made worried glances at each other. So the shiver up Eragon’s spine surely wasn't just his own.

“Pa,” Orsin said. “Don't say that about the Empire…”

“What are they gonna do? With this kinda handiwork, they'd be lucky to hit the broadside of this butchery, let alone me.”

Eragon didn't want to correct Sloan that it was his marksmanship. He didn't have to save his own embarrassment, because Orsin dragged it to Sloan and slew it himself.

“Wasn't our handiwork, pa.” He pointed over his shoulder. “It was the squirt’s.”

“Ah, well, then the bar’s a little lower, eh? C’mon in here.”

Eragon stepped in. He tried to hide the sting of Sloan insulting his skill with a forced, crooked smile.

“Where'd you find this one?”

“In the Spine.” He didn't have to call Sloan sir, not unless he demanded it.

“See, pa, that's technically still illegal…” Orsin filled Sloan in on his little extortion. To his normally thin credit, Sloan seemed just a little miffed, his cocky, crooked-toothed smirk turning into the kind of scowl that made his sandy whiskers shrink under his jowls.

“Since when does the empire give a damn about poachin’, boy? C’mon, we’re carving this beauty up.” Sloan dragged the deer behind the counter.

Orsin shot a glare at Eragon. The disappointment couldn't have been more obvious.

  
Eragon wandered outside. It was going to take a long while for Sloan to finish carving the deer, and he wasn't one for trying to converse with Orsin. The town of Carhavall was waking up, and with it the central roundabout around the well started to fill up again. These people were all the kind of villagers sculpted into their professions; every farmer coming in must have had the kind of upper body strength to lift Eragon straight off his feet.

Then there was Katrina Carver, the only girl in the village he knew personally who didn't have more than an inch above him. She came out from behind the butchery, her golden hair tied up in a ponytail and her frock covered from toe to hands in dried blood, and a soaked sack of unusable stuff — bones, probably, but Eragon didn’t want to know what else given the stench — in one hand.

She offered him an awkward smile. He stiffly waved back. He didn’t know exactly why he had to be awkward around her. Maybe it was the sense that the thin butchery walls picked up on Sloan’s ribbing, but it wasn’t as if he had personal feelings for her; that was Roran’s thing.

“Hey, squirt,” she said while she didn’t miss a beat at tossing aside the sack of garbage. “You sure got pa all in a tizzy over that deer.” She folded her arms. “The Spine, huh?”

“Yeah. The Spine.”

“How Deep in this time?”

 _You’re covered in pig blood, I don’t think any way I’ll answer this will impress you_ , he thought. He laughed. “The gorge, actually. The one with the river.” The stink-eye Katrina gave him told him that maybe he was too ambiguous. Damnable nerves.

“Right. Isn’t your family worried sick about you?”

His father, maybe. He looked away, because that ‘maybe’ was ‘surely.’

“Go on then! No use hanging ‘round here, not while Pa’s tryin’ to sculpt fancy venison.”

“Yeah, I kind of want that for my family.”

“Well, then bugger off and go fetch Roran! I’ll make sure Orsin and Pa don’t eat it all.”

Of course. Because if anything, both Katrina and Roran has a one-tracked mind recently. About each other. He would have teased Katrina about it, but he was sure Orsin was already on that. His forced smile became a knowing grin. He winked at Katrina and stretched. With a wave, he headed back to the town center, to find the road northwest to the outer homesteads. He didn’t wait to say goodbye.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In terms of how the story as a whole plays out, this chapter makes sense in its own way in the original, at least on the broad strokes. Eragon has somehow missed the fact that the egg he in fact found is an egg, and he wants to exchange it for something that his family can use. He is willing to give up a capital-M-Macguffin for meat.
> 
> The problem with the original is, like a lot of these chapters, once someone starts asking questions about little details the answer boils down to: ‘it's the macguffin, and it can't leave Eragon’s hands at any point during the beginning.’ This means that though there is the threat that Eragon could give the egg to Sloan, it cannot be followed through on. If you cannot credibly make that threat, it shouldn’t be there.
> 
> Then there are the setting details: what kind of town is Caravall if there's a butcher and a blacksmith who take payment in actual money? If the empire has never been able to tame The Spine, how are they here? What do they have to gain by being here? How fertile is the valley of Eragon’s family is both able to grow crops here, yet also be living on a subsistence cycle? Who collects their taxes? Are there any taxes and is there a tax collector who’s some smarmy bastard that the whole town just kind of tolerates? Is there anything beyond a personal pride that Garrow has that prevents him from accepting charity from others? Why don't these people have last names related to their professions the way medieval peasants and other non-nobility would earn monikers that eventually became surnames?
> 
> Granted, Sloan Cleaver and Horst Smith do sound too on the nose, but that is beside the point. None of the above questions have a wrong answer, or even a highly specific one (at least in a fantasy story where the setting is wholecloth). Anyone who writes any story with these questions will have different answers (and probably even more questions), but part of making a believable world is not only answering the sensory details but providing some kind of scense for the reader to answer any of those questions on their own. In the case of this and other chapters, the scense given to me to follow did not provide enough info to answer any of those questions. So I filled in the gaps with the kind of information you can google about medieval peasant life.

**Author's Note:**

> Hello. This is Archbass, and this is a fic that serves two purposes: applying criticism from multiple sources, as well as a thought experiment of sorts: what would happen if said criticism was applied? I will try not to make the end-note section of each chapter an essay, but there is a lot of criticism to cover.  
> The idea had been on the back-burner in my mind for a long time, but I was inspired by a series of videos about another piece of flawed fiction: Belated Media's series on the Star Wars prequels.  
> While those videos focused mainly on streamlining a story to focus on character and theme instead of … politics, the mission behind this fic is a little bit more comprehensive in scope for three major reasons. As this is the first chapter, let's outline these, because we will revisit them repeatedly:  
> A: The Inheritance Cycle, especially in its first two books, plagiarizes most of its cast and story beats wholesale from Star Wars. The Monomyth is ubiquitous in all its incarnations -- but Inheritance has such uncanny similarities to Star Wars that "Star Wars with dragons, elves, dwarves, and orcs" is an apt, if understated, summary. While later books end up straying from Star Wars’ story beats, the early commitment to it on the conceptual level makes later attempts to diverge from it fall flat. This requires a complete, structural reworking to fix.  
> B: Eragon as a protagonist is treated as objectively, absolutely good. His moral compass goes completely unquestioned, especially early on. Protagonists don't always have to be complete dicks in fantasy stories, but "The Ends Justify the Means" does not mean “don’t question it.”  
> Problem C: The motivations behind every character, especially the antagonists, are paper-thin, and crumple the moment anyone asks any probing questions -- revealing a not stunning but not unsurprising lack of forethought. This happens in many a story anyway, but what sets the Inheritance Cycle apart from the others is the manner in which it gleefully ignores these probing questions about who and what people's motivations are, despite having ample space to develop them.  
> That's just the beginning of a long line of World Building and structural issues which I'll explore in other end-notes.  
> With these in mind: let's talk first chapters. The original opens up with Durza attacking Arya and her guards in an attempt to steal back the dragon egg they are carrying. The goal of this scene is clear: to establish the stakes behind the plot in the long-term, and to point towards the macguffin. Taken on its face, these main goals are met, but where the scene falls apart on its own is in the details.  
> While action packed and exciting, the original opening is a beat-for-beat reconstruction of the opening scene of Star Wars Episode IV -- Durza is our Darth Vader to Arya's Princess Leia. Though I do appreciate Christopher Paeolini's attempt to raise the stakes there, the tension of the scene needs to depend on the battle establishing the power of the antagonists, that the Empire is not liked, and that there's efforts to rebel, not the awesomeness of elves in combat. What we later learn of elves in the original more raises questions than establishes a baseline of tension.  
> So, I started this edition from the point of view of one of Arya's body guards. This maintains the mystery behind what Arya is doing while refocusing the tension on the mission's success or failure. We have an easier time depicting the battle in a more frantic pace. This is a loss that Arya and her guards are going to fight tooth and nail, but aren’t going to win. If any of them escape, it won't be pretty.  
> You’ll notice a stunning lack of exposition here. Well, there is some: just enough to say who the hell these guys are, and what they’re doing in the middle of a dangerous mountain range. But the majority of this story needs many of its setting details communicated either through dialogue or through the senses. This also applies to the relationships between at least two of these characters, though we functionally have a little more wiggle room for that considering only one of them is a mainstay for the series (Hint: it isn’t Faolin, our temporary shoo-in for audience surrogate before Eragon enters the stage).  
> Durza is a more conniving villain in the original -- and in revision, the simple question is: why not both strong and conniving? Or, why not a little more arrogant? You'll also notice that Durza's nature is more ambiguous. I'll get into this more in later discussions, but the long and short of it is that immediately identifying him as a "shade" leaves no room for exploring his motivations without a lot of retroactive continuity (hey, if one wanted Darth Vader analogues, Durza would be your man, before Murtagh, that is). You'll be seeing that a lot in this revision. A lot. Don't be surprised if that happens to most of the antagonists.


End file.
